Longer answer: I stated out trying to integrate this along side each new feature. This was problematic because a lot of features interact heavily, and I was having to separately bug-test each possible combination of settings.
A lot of the principles of good coding that professionals learn in school are designed to avoid these inter-dependency issues between systems. Unfortunately I have not been formally educated in computer science and am learning these lessons the hard way, but I am learning.
What I plan to do is that when a given feature is “mature” (ie complete, mostly bug free, and written in a way that I don’t anticipate having to change); I will then go in and try to make as many elements of that feature configurable as possible. Unfortunately at the moment there are basically no features for which this is the case today. I do plan on making a couple toggles in a soon-to-come release, but it won’t be very granular for some time.
Edit: to see the available options now and in the future press shift-F10.
I’ve thought a fair bit about this part of your question, less in terms of FBO’s specifically as you describe in your other thread and more as a general thought. Part of that is that I am not super familiar with how FBO’s operate, so its hard for me to think about how to work them into the game.
I do see a need for something in between the current passive GA and the manage-every-detail commercial flights. I’d love to build a system for myself where its reasonably easy to set up “special” airline/air-operator contracts with requirements that are quite different from the usual mainline stuff. For instance a company could base a plane out of a hanger (which they lease from you as part of the contract) at your field and be entitled to a certain number of takeoffs and landings per day/week; those takeoffs and landings working more like GA flights where the player isn’t very involved.
The direct answer to your question is that I’m open to it but don’t have an adequate vision in mind for how to pull it off (both in terms of making it fun and engaging and in terms of how do I actually program this). There’s also a lot of stuff in the que ahead of this, so its certainly not happening in 2022 for example.
Yeah, FBOs provide fueling, terminal services (which are far more luxurious than a regular terminal), maintenance (depending on the FBO), as well as they rent out parking for GA aircraft. So like you described ideally that would allow aircraft to be based at your airport. Plus, on a cool aspect, this would probably allow big GA aircraft to come in like Gulfstreams and stuff.
Say, we have the Service vehicles in the code, don’t we? What if this will operate similar?
Let’s brainstorm:
Pilot arrives at airport and needs to pass vehicle checkpoint. From there, he waits at a “shuttle bus” stand similar to a taxi stand. A Sprinter or similar vehicle will fetch him and drive him to his plane. Operation at the stand will work similar like ramp agents getting to their job only with the difference that the pilot is delivered and enters the plane. Vice versa for pilots arriving.
Bonus thoughts: let there be parking lots inside the service area zone where the pilot can park his car (or can be picked up by one). Alternatively, we could build a zone like “staff zone” but call it “pilot zone” and put couches, tables and food/drink machines and toilets there. Pilots will spend their time there until they leave again to their plane.
Last, but not least, the GA could request repairs and maintenance as service and will go to a stand first to get fuelled, but then go to a hangar to get repairs and a service round. Pilot pickup car would go to the hangar instead to deliver/fetch pilot.
Now…this COULD be done like this, but what is possible with the existing code?
The route generation update is on the horizon and will make use of the countryCode entry in the airline.json. If this is left empty, the airline will behave as a vanilla one, with routes to and from anywhere. If you would like your airline to generate flights with at least one end point in the home country, make sure the entry is present.
I knowwww. That and the possibility of cargo excite me so much. Cause imagine you could start with cargo, then move onto FBOs, then move onto passenger traffic. That would be fun as hell
Doing a slightly quiet initial launch because I expect with so many changes to have some work to do to make it work well.
2.2.x represents a shift from my mod being designed with vanilla airlines in mind to being designed with real airlines as provided by mods in mind. That doesn’t mean that I’ll be making play with vanilla airlines worse, but more that I’m getting into improvements where I personally would prefer to fully use them by adding real world airlines to my mix.
The big new feature in 2.2.x is that airlines will respect their nationality by operating from their home country. This means that your airports location heavily impacts the airlines you will serve and what types of aircraft airlines will be flying in with.
With this change, I also completely re-wrote route generation. In theory it is much smarter now. There is a risk of it being “too smart” and not offering sufficient route/aircraft variety. Given that location matters so much now (both because of nationality but also because of the distance you are from concentrations of airports of any given size) I honestly need a bunch of play-testing data to make sure that I’ve struck a balance between believable realism and crippling realism.
Side Notes
I fixed what was becoming a super annoying bug in the planner that resulted in skipped flights and problematic UI. If you felt that flights just weren’t reliably carrying forward day to day you might want to try again now.
The “different departure vs arrival route” feature is on hold until I am confident that the simple there-and-back-again system is working well.
Baggage is still being checked in for flights without baggage service, driving down airport rating. Its on the list, but in the background I’ve been working on the ability to save and load data to and from your save file. Once I am confident with that it will expand the tools I have available to make the turnaround services work how I’d envisioned.
I’m using keywords like “link” and “express” to identify little regional carriers that shouldn’t fly internationally. keyword submissions are welcome.
Did try it out a bit yesterday! So far it definitely works! I guess it could be messy with some countries when it comes to numbers of airports vs size of the country, at least for me it was a very specific test.
So my airport for now is very small, I only handle SAAB 340, Playing as Copenhagen Airport ( Denmark) And one of the airlines I have flying SAABs to my airport is a small Finish company, and sure enough they only offer flight to Finland! And that’s soo awesome. However for now, possibly because of the small aircraft also. I only get about three airports they fly too, I do know at least two more that should be able to get offered.
I will play more today, and see if it does pop up. Also I am expanding so I can try with the big airlines.
Will tell you more if I find anything interesting.
Where I live although the distance is quite short big planes are used (40 minutes flight) will that be taken into consideration? maybe check what plaes areused in real world routes of the companies and apply them.
The current version is not optimized for smaller countries and short route for medium planes. I had some intensive tests yesterday. The minimum ranges of medium aircrafts is currently a big to high.
I haven’t even had a Q400 between CZ and AT.
Yeah I am experiencing the same thing? I have just build so I can handle medium planes, and have just accepted all the Normal European airlines. I am Copenhagen, But I get very little medium flights within EU, the ones I get is to south Italy and Greece, Spain, a few to Germany and Norway. Probably because it want longer distance for medium aircraft?
Link now directs to a new build. Aircraft are less picky about the size airports they serve. Aircraft, especially smaller aircraft, are less picky about serving routes that use their full range.
This is a pretty difficult thing to do, though I do want to support it (or something similar) as an option in the future. I don’t want to be dependent on a system that requires potentially hundreds of hours to manually add aircraft and routes to.
If you could let me know which 3 those are I could look at them as an example case. My guess is that they are larger airports than my mod is wanting to allow the little SAAB to fly to, but if that’s unrealistic the mod can change
This clear feedback from several people is super helpful; hopefully it won’t take too many iterations to get good results!
Been trying a bit now with medium aircraft! More and more flight within EU is popping up. But still mostly getting flights to the south parts of Europe.
And sure, reading the SAAB340 before. The airline was Air Åland a small finish (later Swedish airline) But it did only offer flights to the three biggest airports in Finland. I saw the update, will see if that change anything regarding the SAAB!
Been checking flights for my small airlines. I do see more airports in the mix. Before it was like the three biggest, now it’s more like 5 or so, the tweaking is working!
Another topic or question, disregarding the bug, Personally I think that a lot more flights should request baggage? I do believe it’s more common to skip food and/or fuel, and cleaning.
Also my second question. Is it only baggage that affects the rating for now? Or is it the same bug with Catering and cleaning?
Third question, If I identify a modded airline still offering flights all over, that is likely due to the modder not putting a country code? Should I reach out to the modder directly or hold off until some more testing and tweaking is done?
